 Hello and good evening. I'm Editha Chakraborty, senior economics commentator at The Guardian, or as Morrissey described us just last week, a wretched hate paper that sums up all that is sad and wrong with modern Britain. My business card is being changed as we speak and that will go underneath the on the Guardian masthead, the Guardian, all that is sad and wrong with modern Britain. It's my great pleasure to be conducting this conversation with Anand Gyadadas. Anand's been a New York Times correspondent in Bombay. He's written books about India, about the fracturing of America, and he's written this latest book, Winner's Take All, which has caused, it's fair to say, a great deal of controversy and soul searching amongst NGOs, amongst people who do philanthropy, amongst social enterprises. Basically, among those bits of the private sector that like to believe that they can do some good. Not so argues Anand. They are, to some degree, peddling false promises. They may think they're doing good, they're actually helping themselves do well. They may think they're changing things, they're actually helping to preserve the status quo. When I say that's provoked a fair amount of soul searching, that's not hyperbolic. The whole reason that we're having this meeting here is because the people behind meaning, which for those of you who don't know, is a regular conference that happens just down the road in Brighton every November, which is aimed precisely at people who would like to do purpose-driven business or would like to be involved in social enterprise, would like to think they are doing good while still functioning within the capitalist economy. The people who organised that conference have organised this special meaning spotlight event with a view to discussing those very questions aimed at the Anand raises in his book among people who might see a lot of justice in his criticism, but might also feel slightly uneasy. So for the people at meaning, this is a bit of a tour into discomfort, and for that I salute them. The other thing I should say before we begin is that for most of this conversation it's going to be me and Anand, but we invite you to tweet in your questions on the hashtag, hashtag AskAnand, and there'll be an exciting moment at a certain point in the evening when someone will run on with some handwritten questions which I'll read out. But let's get cracking. Anand, you know whereof you speak because you actually had some exposure to the world of doing good. Can you tell us a bit about that? First of all, it's great to be in Brighton speaking to all the people who couldn't get Elton John tickets. I'm really happy to be your consolation prize. We're very similar except he's a knighted superstar and I'm not. I think one way to tell the story of the origin of Winters Take All is as a kind of confluence of two discoveries that I made. One a slightly longer term discovery slowly and the other a more momentary thing. The longer term thing was simply watching my country, the United States, you use the word fracture over a period of time after the financial crisis, but even frankly before that, and watching this strange reality which probably has some resonance here of this country that is outwardly wealthy, has a lot of great companies, is able to do a lot of things in the world, has a high standard of living, and yet increasingly seems to fail 30, 40, 50, 60, 70% of its people persistently, and the future seems to bypass most of its people, and I began to be curious about why. I also began to be curious about why in that difficult moment so many of the people that I had come up with, I was in my 20s heading towards my 30s, people start to make decisions about what they want to do in life and I saw all these people who were idealistic, who spoke in a 1960s language about wanting to change the world and make the world a better place and fight power and whatever. And then as we got a little older and you started to see those choices, people were going to banks to change the world. They were starting software companies in Silicon Valley to change the world. They were starting impact investment funds to change the world. And I started to wonder how it is that we live in this time with real urgent needs in the United States, which I think you would probably say is true here too, and all these people were going somewhere else. Now the more immediate thing that I think you're referring to is I got this very special ringside seat into how this happens because in 2011 I got this phone call. The phone call was from an institution, kind of a benevolent open secret society called the Aspen Institute. And there's different organizations like this in the world that's sort of like Davos or one of these things. This particular one was about taking 20 or so mostly business people every year and sort of like you were describing with the meaning event. And in a way giving them a sense of greater meaning beyond business, right? And so these 20 or so business people would meet four times over two years in Aspen and other places. Aspen is very beautiful. Great place to think about making the world a better place. So they'd meet these four times. They would read Plato and Aristotle and whatever. They'd also read Gandhi. They'd also read, this was a bit of a clue, Jack Welch. And having read them they would discuss this and talk about how they could make more of a difference, give back, not just run their companies but do something more. And I was invited into this thing. I'm obviously not a business person, but I was invited into it because they figured out a long time ago that 20 business people in a room is a recipe, is a sort of human ambient, going to put people to sleep. So they decided to, every class they would put a TV person, a writer, an artist, some activists, just a couple of, you know. So I was the Indian Spice in my class. And it was a really interesting experience to people that I frankly don't normally have access to or talk to or know people who run an aviation repair business in Oklahoma, things like that, right? These are not people I meet in my life. And it was very interesting and it was all about we are going to change the world, we're going to get together, we're going to solve the biggest problems of our time, we're going to fight inequality, we're going to advance injustice. And as I got deeper and deeper into that world it started to dawn on me and I wish it had dawned on me, I would like to say it dawned on me within six seconds, but it actually took me time because people were nice and interesting and the wine was good and it seemed a pleasant thing to go to Aspen and talk to these people about making the world a better place. And they were sincere. But it began to occur to me that the same people gathering in Aspen, when you actually dug a little bit into what they did in their day jobs, were the people causing the problems they were trying to solve. They were the bankers who had caused the 2008 meltdown around the world now talking about how to increase housing justice. They were the people who sell soft drinks to kids that foreshorten their lives and give them diabetes and all these other conditions, talking about health equity. They were the very people in Silicon Valley starting to compromise all of our privacy and as you know in this country the same as mine, starting to frankly let their platforms be used as vessels for cyber war on our electoral processes that was happening and they were letting it happen because they didn't want anything to get in the way of their growth. Basically selling out democracy itself and then they were coming to Aspen to talk about freedom. And it just began to grate on me. I have to say I was not alone. There was a bunch of people who started sitting in the back row kind of complaining. It was all the people they shouldn't have let in. The artists, the writers, the journalists, the mistakes. I don't know if they do that anymore. And finally four years into this thing they asked me to give, I had been through it, it was done. There's a summer reunion, they asked me to give a talk at this reunion and it wasn't an unusual thing actually, they generally had an allergy to outside speakers so they would just have, if someone made a documentary film within this group, you'd show your film or if someone did something we'd speak to each other. So they asked me to give a talk about a book I'd written, about a hate crime and act of forgiveness and I said yes and then I realized I was going to give a different talk but I didn't want to tell them that because then they would have cancelled it. So I said you know I just changed my talk a little bit and they said that's fine and I got up there much as I am now on a stage except I didn't have a wingman and I basically gave this talk to this room full of some of the richest and most powerful billionaires, millionaires in America, captains of industry saying you are not the saviors you think you are. You're trying to solve the big problems of America and the world right now but your institutions you're part of are in many ways the cause of those same problems and that's difficult you got to grapple with that we have to grapple with that and what it may require is that we stop asking you all to be generous and give back and do this and we actually start demanding justice of you which actually may mean that you have less power you have less wealth we actually tax you more and what essentially happened was I got a standing ovation from a room full of people who looked like they wanted to kill me with their eyes and then later at the bar a guy summed up the whole thing by coming to me and saying private equity man puts his hand out from private equity man handshake and he says you're an asshole and not long after that I should say the speech got out into the world people were angered by it excited by it everything in between and I decided there was more there so I started writing reporting really a book about it before we get on to the book how old were you at the time of that speech? 34 so you were in your early 30s and you're in the lap of luxury canapes on tap there's so many canapes so many canapes you almost don't have time for the main course and all the billionaires are nice and friendly and welcoming and I've seen some of your early work I've read some of your early work and it's all you've got a real story teller's eye but the politics in it feel to me rather different from this book what is it in you that decides first of all you're going to literally bite the hand that's been feeding you and secondly what is it in you politically that changes? Good question I think it was you know I'll say this I think one of the traps that afflicts a lot of journalism when we think about inequality which is such a defining fact about modern United States modern Britain one of the it's incredibly important issue to have reporting around so we understand why people are voting for Trump why people are voting for Brexit, what's going on we need to know here's the issue on the issue of inequality there's a lot more access at the bottom than there is at the top you could walk into any poor person's home or slum and they're delighted to explain to share to tell you the facts of their life how much money they got last month how much they spent, whatever bills you want to see you want to understand they'll show you right it's obvious but I'll say it that there's no such transparency or willingness at the top but writing about inequality by only writing about people at the bottom is sort of like trying to understand the architecture of Notre Dame by interviewing three American tourists who happen to be standing in it right now poor people didn't design the world that made them poor and so part of the radicalizing experience for me part of the project of this book was to say hold on, why do we always report on inequality by writing about people at the bottom why are all the books about poverty, about slum dwellers and people living in drug war how come no one writes about the same detail and inner life and dilemmas of the people who actually build, maintain and operate these systems and by the way, I hadn't done that reporting either until that point and I didn't know the answers to that I think that's all well said but just you personally right when I did that report, say it again you're in amongst these people before you're going to make this speech and you're about to turn your Gatling gun on them and mode them all down that's a good question but it started before that I think that's when I say that this had been going on I think going back to my previous book which I started in 2011 and it had come out in 2014 a year before this that was a book about the fracturing of the two Americas and it took me to a lot of these places in ex-urban, small town, white America this is well before Trump but it sort of anticipated Trump in that these were places that in the American imagination are supposed to be sound and solid and fine and they were destroyed meth, opioids, no work half the men in out of jail these are white communities in these rural areas that are kind of venerated in the American imagination and that was a very radicalizing experience I mean I've always been radicalized by my reporting I try not to come to these with a prefab theory because I have found in my reporting that there are you know when I was in India I saw capitalism doing many good things in a context when it was up against things that were worse like caste and I actually saw what happens when a town, people can get jobs in a town because the bank actually doesn't care what their caste is and everybody else in the town does care what their caste is and in that context I've been able to celebrate the role that a bank may play in a town but what I saw in my reporting in this context in this time and place was that you had this country, the United States where companies and very rich people had essentially double tripled their share of the nation's goodies and were sucking the life out of the Republic and you saw this happening elsewhere also and it was really my reporting that I am still a reporter with opinions, my opinions grew out of my reporting and I think the politics grew out of the observation that something had drastically changed in America where most people started to feel subjectively that the society was working for somebody but not them and that they were right about that a lot of the time and then that continued when I actually got into that Aspen world, I felt I was meeting the people responsible for the second book and meeting the people who were not only responsible but who thought that they were the saviours to the phenomenon described in the second book while they were cranking the machine that was making the problem worse and I think the naivete the very dangerous naivete of it pushed me and I think yes, you're right helped me understand get to a very different place politically in understanding that money in a way has its own logic and power and as I had seen in India that can be marshaled for good in certain situations but that was not what was happening in this situation OK, so this leads on to your book, Winnie's Day Call it's a book as you say, it's reported and there are a lot of scenes from the people right at the top I'd like you to give us just a flavour of one no scenes I'm thinking about the cruise ship and Ed Snowden, I wonder if you wouldn't mind just recapping that I went on a cruise ship full of 3,000 entrepreneurs who believe they can change the world just so you don't have to so you should thank me later at the bar I wanted to find places where this religion and I really do believe it's a religion the religion of doing well by doing good the religion of win-win the religion of we can have our cake and give it back to we can cause a housing crisis and market ourselves as the solution to the housing crisis we can fatten kids and build them playgrounds that's a religion otherwise people wouldn't be able to do it it would make them too sad the religion allows you to keep doing it the religion allows you to keep driving to work at Pepsi every day you need that and so I was curious about where the religion is being evangelized because people need refueling and conferences are a big part of that story so that became a big part of the book and one of them was this thing called Summit at Sea 3,000 entrepreneurs on this cruise ship going from Florida to the Bahamas and back and what was so fascinating about it was it was a group of people I don't think you could get on the boat with some exceptions they also had a lot of yoga teachers because they needed women for all these male entrepreneurs it was a very messed up situation trust me but with the exception of the yoga teachers hired for gender balance they were almost to a person all entrepreneurs none of them worked some worked for big companies but that was not the majority more of the speakers maybe worked for Apple or things like that entrepreneurs but entrepreneurs convinced that every dollar they make is making the world better by ten dollars that they are almost this sort of Christ-like business figures who are sacrificing by making money and helping others on this scale it's my cupcake company that is going to help girls in Afghanistan it's the shoe you buy these shoes and we will put a shoe on some other foot in some other country that you'll never be able to verify you know it's the sunglasses you know, bono I don't even know I just put the word bono into things and it makes them sound like they're do-gooder things and everybody on that boat shared that ideology and I have this moment in the boat where they had a motivational speaker come on and you know, rile everybody up at the beginning and he said you know I'm not going to get this exactly right but he said you know a couple of pointers to make use of your time on the boat first of all the boat's not about getting drunk and getting naked well actually it sort of is second, this is not about you know this is not about kind of just business but you know this is about making like life connections but also this place can really help your pocketbook right you're going to make money here you're going to make deals here and what was so fascinating is like the way in which all these things come together in this religion making money, promoting yourself making the world a better place win-win and in some one way to think about winners take all is an attempt to fire a lot of ammunition at the fraudulent idea of win-win of doing well by doing good of this idea of making the world a better place that tells rich people and corporations that nothing has to change for them to improve the state of the world that you can somehow in a town like this empower workers give them more money whatever without that ever coming at the expense of the people who own the companies right now there's a lot going on in that scene which is I think it's a remarkable scene that you've just given us a flavour of but what is it that most horrifies you about it is it the vulgarity is it the hypocrisy is it the attempt to marketise dissent which of those things really gets your goat I think you know the most important sub tribe within that group was the tech entrepreneurs and I focus the chapter in a way on them and I think they scare me the most for the following reason in every age there's some new power centre that really shapes the whole world Rome, Greece and I'm talking about that scale you guys had a good run and I would argue today that is Silicon Valley a very small place that makes decisions that whether you like it or not decide what your phone is like how addicted you are to it what you use in the office The new Rome is Palo Alto in Silicon Valley which other place has a very small number of people making decisions that you can't opt out of anywhere in the world that are shaping everything work, love if you're dating someone you're on their tools you're looking up information which is all of us you're on their tools we're all living in their world that's an immense amount of power it's not elected power it's very new power and one of the very strange perversities of that particular place which I found on the boat and just in life in my reporting is that those people have a fantasy of being the opposite of powerful they think they're rebels they think they're woodstock they think they're hippies they think they're fighting the man they have no awareness that they are the man that they're as manly a man as has ever existed in history maybe in history Sophie people have actually never wielded such intimate power into the heads of three or four billion people but they think they're rebels they wear hoodies some of it is a little put on but a lot of it is actually not put on which makes it so dangerous they actually believe that they are fighting the power structure I think people at Facebook some of them genuinely believe that that governments are corrupt and cynical companies but Facebook is going to connect humanity never mind if Britain and America are no longer democracies because of them that's another problem and so on the boat one of the things I saw was this ultimate power move of denying you have power and how dangerous that move is and I describe this guy who's a big shareholder in Uber who talks about how he his own mentality but also Uber just Uber denies it's a car service it says it's a matchmaking platform for drivers and riders to find each other why? that way it's not responsible for anything that happens if your driver stabs you or you stab your driver just you know it's more responsible than a phone book would be for two people who find each other and a phone book stabbing each other obviously preposterous but that's what it looks like to deny power to deny your monopoly to deny that you're Amazon and you're essentially cornering the entire market on actually everything and so I became very curious about deconstructing that story and how that story of powerlessness at the heart of power has become one of the kind of lubricants of this age of inequality the people in other words most responsible for these power imbalances pretend that they're on the side of breaking up power it's genius you describe it as the arsonist coming along to put out the fire I want to take just a few examples of arsonist trying to put out the fire and just really quickly get your view on what's wrong so the Koch brothers funding right wing think tanks is that not just good for debate? I was at the Oxford Union having a debate a couple days ago and someone made a point about the Koch brothers and then there's something very awkward happened in the room and no one knew what was happening and then they realized some Koch brothers descendant was in the room so I gave them a special welcome when I went up there he did not look happy I also suggested that they might soon be renaming that the Koch Oxford Union Oxford and Koch so one of the very fascinating things about the Koch brothers is if you don't know them very rich family in America one of the richest families chemical bounty paper towels lot of different kind of obscure, not obscure but everyday products you don't think of not sexy like your phone or anything like that but giant conglomerate chemicals, oil all kind of stuff very right wing and one of the fascinating things about them called dark money by Jane Mayer which I strongly urge you to read in which she basically shows that philanthropy was the dominant method by which the right conquered American culture the hatred of government these are not natural occurrences you don't have a society like the United States having one set of views around government in 1975 and then having a completely different set of views about government being awful and that doesn't just happen organically and frankly it doesn't just happen because you have a new Thatcher or Reagan in office there's a lot of work that it takes to fertilize to use a Koch brothers metaphor to fertilize the ground to allow that thing to happen or allow Reagan and Thatcher to do that and at least in the United States a lot of that was achieved philanthropically you create little institutes here you create little fellowships there and it all seems philanthropic but what you're doing is you are you're putting thinkers who agree with that right-wing thing on campuses you're finding back, you're creating culture you're funding economists and one of the points that this book makes which I did not understand was that you tend to think of the left as being a more ideas friendly side of the spectrum but Jane Mayer makes the point that in America at least the right has been much more aggressive in understanding the need to fund ideas and the left has just trusted that ideas will emerge from the marketplace of ideas Okay, that was your slow ball by the way for this round That was the one that was easy for you to bat Let's do something which is I think slightly harder George Soros another billionaire funding Preston City Council to set up worker-owned corporatives What's wrong with that? That's something I like more and the reason I like it is not because of George Soros the reason I like it is because it's working with government if I understand the example correctly A big part of the critique of the book is that some of the people who have fought to discredit and undermine government who fought for low taxes for themselves deregulation which led to them having more money government having less capacity and less resources then turn around and give a little bit of that money back to solve some of the problems that they've essentially helped cause because government was defanged I like it more when people are at least investing in making public systems work better which I take from that example I still don't like how he probably made the money that's going to that I still don't think we should have systems that allow someone like him to make that much money while so many people have so little but if you're saying if he's sitting there with a pile of money would I rather he create some private thing that he runs by himself or help make local government work better? I'd much rather he help make local government work better but it's still his foundation that's deciding that the work so there's several, right and this is the other thing there's several different problems we could think about with these kind of philanthropic solutions one is it's often reputation laundering I cause a problem I do a little bit of a solution over here with a really good publicist and I hope that the solution essentially overwrites the problem in the public imagination that's an obvious problem you know a second is I am trying to alter the discussion I don't want people to be talking about taxes so I will promote some kind of personal finance app that helps people manage their money a little better because I hope that at the margin that will make people talk less about a solution that would cost me but then there's even if you are a noble person even if you, you know let's say you are a tennis player who never heard anybody but you made like just a lot of money because you played tennis and let's say all your endorsement deals were relatively you know clothes that were made in nice conditions or whatever even so if you decide you want to reshape public schools in Britain or the United States or reshape some other area of public life who are you to do that why do we actually bother with voting if in the night club of democracy there's some other door where only billionaires can walk in and just have like a million votes each on public policies so my critique isn't only about people who cause problems and then seek to you know clean it up a little bit with you know what I've called the wet wipe of philanthropy it's also that even if you are a good person who's not trying to do that there's a question about how much power is too much power for one person in a democracy and there's an interesting thing from 100 years ago when John D Rockefeller tried to set up his foundation of the US essentially that legal structure did not exist so he had to create something he asked the congress the congress said no can you imagine that today a guy wants to give away his money but the congress had real skepticism it wasn't blanket opposed to him but it was skeptical who are you to have say over all these areas of public life right so he came back a year later with a counter proposal to the US congress that is an amazing document and he basically says I hear you your concerns are valid here's what I propose and I'm not going to get all of this right but I'll give you a sense of it he says you know I'm going to set up this foundation at any point you think this is not serving the public good you can just dissolve the foundation and put the money into the US treasury billionaire said that back then it's a very enlightened idea there's actually some accountability to his thing if you think this is not better than just having the money collected as taxes you take it you can create public bodies either of your own members or other public governors presidents of universities whatever you want public spirited people and have them oversee our foundation didn't have to oversee our foundation I wouldn't be ruling over and he proposed various other things that actually created a model where you could have the money be going to public causes but have some sense of public accountability over it they didn't accept that either remarkably he went to New York state to get a charter he got an easy charter with none of these stipulations and the rest is history the New York state model became the model for the world and that thing he proposed to the congress which was actually great disappeared final example a brief reaction to this a very rich English guy decides that he's going to dodge taxes perhaps by not giving inheritance to his children but will pump it instead into a newspaper and then give the newspaper to his children you mean yes it will be run in a foundation in the name of his children but the children have no control over the newspaper that's philanthropy right that's a rich guy that's tax dodging that's also how the guardian is secured today I should say that's why there was some recognition on the audience I still think tax dodging is tax dodging regardless of where it goes and I think the reality is I want there to be a less bad system I do however think within a bad system there are still better and worse ways to operate I think bad money ending up supporting robust investigative journalism is a happier ending than bad money funding like deceptive economists but I think we have to step back and say whether it's a good outcome or a bad outcome why is this the model of society that we want where we allow very few people to capture almost all of the gains of change itself I mean you're absolutely right to bring that up I suppose that the point of just bringing up that example about the guardian was that happened nearly 100 years ago so it shows that these issues that people have wrestled with for generations I want to just come up to the present day to talk in particular about something that I suspect a lot of people here will have a personal interest in in the book you talk a lot about B-Course you've got a passage about B-Course and about social enterprises now B-Course for those who don't know are companies which have got a kind of watermark if you like a kind of certificate that says that they're trying to do good and they're held to certain standards but you're very skeptical about them I found slightly what I just resolved from at that point in the book I failed to see how a social enterprise that runs a cafe aimed at helping people with dementia in Portsmouth for instance has got anything to do is even in the same world as Goldman Sachs or Citibank and that was one thing where I was a bit confused and I don't think I'm necessarily I'm going after that that's great but you're very skeptical about these people having any kind of real impact right? I am skeptical about the level of impact something like that can have because I think at least in my country we have hugely defunded mental health services and all those kinds of things so to the extent that you throw a cafe against a problem like that not only are you not necessarily solving it when part of the risk is you are contributing to a narrative in which that kind of problem is solvable by a cafe and I think that contributes to a lie we tell ourselves but at the same time I respect the cafe for trying to do that and I understand where it's coming from and there's a lot of bleeding in our society and it is noble to try to put a bandaid on bleeding but when the cause of the bleeding the ultimate cause of it is cancer dangerous to think you've solved the issue when you've put a bandaid on it that's my concern so where do you think the role for business in fixing problems so the B Corp thing this whole book is based on characters where I really talk to real people who are grappling with these things and my own sense of it emerges from talking to them so my character for this B Corp section of the book is a guy named Andrew Casoy who was one of the people who started this B Corp certification thing to give this stamp to better behaved businesses that really have to prove they treat workers differently they do all the environmental standards of different and there were these three founders and Andrew among the three was very interesting to me because I think he had had the most doubts it had been about 10 years since he started this they now had I think thousands of B Corps in this country the US elsewhere and he had started to have doubts about what he'd done he's a private equity guy switched over to kind of changing the world and this is how he's chosen to do it and the doubt he started to have which I explored with him is the question of a lot of attempts to make the world better in our time take the form of what B Corp's done which is essentially making it easier to do good right their company jargon is kind of make good easier right if you could make it easier to obey environmental standards by giving people a way to certify that make it easier to treat workers better and show customers that you're doing that make it easier to be good and I think one of the questions he was grappling with 10 years on you have a few thousand companies certified you got a few million companies in the United States alone so a very small fraction of companies have been live under this voluntary jurisdiction and I think he started to ask himself the question is it more important to make good easier or to make bad harder and the reality is I believe that no matter how much you voluntarily make good easier you could do 10,000 companies you could do 50,000 companies one exon mobile finding it easy to do bad is probably going to dwarf the impact of 10,000 companies that by the way have been certified are probably weren't that evil to begin with right King Arthur flower that I use in my house to make pizza I'm not sure that they were putting petroleum in it until they got a beat corp certification I certainly hope not so you've made some probably modestly good companies maybe a little better or at least able to prove it but the nice thing about this thing we've sort of forgotten about in the Reagan post Reagan Thatcher era is this thing called laws the really cool thing about laws is they actually first focus on making it hard to do a bad thing and they actually just make it illegal for everybody to do the bad thing and they have you know these people love to talk about scale and I always say you know there's a lot of scale the fucking government the government is a lot of scale you know and so if it's actually just illegal to make money by destroying the planet that's actually a really simple elegant solution right or if you have to pay a carbon tax based on fossil fuel extraction or whatever that's actually a really elegant and then companies actually are terrified of going to court of course they evade and do but generally speaking companies are terrified of problems and they obey a lot of things and I just started to wonder whether this voluntary approach of trying to create one nicer cupcake company at a time and one slightly more noble you know pizza company whether you will ever catch up to all the people who are actually perfectly happy to make money by exploiting people exploiting the planet and frankly pushing our societies to the brink and frankly Andrew had started to have that question also just a reminder that if you want to tweeting the question the hashtags ask look I think that answer is fascinating and it brings us to one of the big divides that you draw up in your work which is between the public sector and private sector between the government and business and you end with a political philosopher political theorist who says something along the lines of the state is us which implies basically that business is them really reading that in the context of being in Britain in 2019 I find it really hard to see anything particularly benevolent or on my side about a government that decrees that people are on on a deathbed should be fit for work or that sends its alumni whether it's Tony Blair or George Osborne off to work in the finance sector I really fail to see the us in government now and I wonder where it is that you've got your faith in the public sector I think I mean this is this philosopher's Chiara Cordelli at the University of Chicago she's a really brilliant writer she's a book called the privatized state that's coming in the future so she has this line that government is us I think the point it's a normative point not a descriptive one she is not saying that in every moment or this moment the government perfectly represents us that's not what the government is us means it's a comment about what government is and it's sort of like your family your family is not your family when they are behaving in a way you like otherwise most of us would be orphans your family is your family as a descriptive fact about them and when it's not working well it is all the more important to make it work better and I think the government is like that so your description of and by the way like I live under orange Mussolini so I share your concern about government but it's still my government he's still my president and I still feel responsible for the set of institutions that we have what can be prevented right now what can be done so that this doesn't happen again I'm not going to say it's not my government because he's in charge of it it's all the more my government it's incredibly important to be vigilant about it and that makes government fundamentally different from business if the pub across the street no offence of that pub is not good or they start putting mosquitos in the beer or whatever like they'll be another pub people may miss that pub but they'll be another pub and people will like that pub that's fun no one should be to attached to any particular business businesses subject to the law of competition they rise they fall I do not think government is like that I think government is fundamentally different the way your family is fundamentally different and I mean that in a kind of political philosophical sense of the government is your it's our shared institution it's our commons it's what we built together and at many moments in history it is bad it is inefficient it is unworthy of the responsibility that someone like me may want to transfer to it but that's not a reason to not do those things it's a reason to make government better it's a reason to make the conditions that allow government to work better and if you don't like this government right now in the UK well that's fine but there's a lot of reasons you have a government you don't like and there's a lot of different places to work on it there's a lot of in the system itself and also very far outside that system you could be in the very north of England training young people about how to get involved civically give speeches run for office that's not sitting in Westminster that's actually trying to contribute to a country maybe where you don't have to go to eat and be prime minister and that may take 30 years to bear fruit but you're working to make the that's what I mean that's what it means to me to behave in accordance with the idea that the government is us but Anand there is a long and prestigious history especially on the left of scepticism about the about the role of the state one example nearly 200 years ago a guy called Karl Marx who you might not have read at Aspen said the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie now your political theorist at Chicago she may be a Hegelian who believes that the state somehow represents the most perfect collective expression of mankind but there are lots of people socialists, anarchists, communists who don't believe that and I really wonder how it is that you have such a faith in the state versus other things that you could see in civil society the argument I'd make to you about that cafe in Portsmouth isn't that it sorts out all of mental health problems in Britain today of course it doesn't but it's a way for the woman running the cafe to exercise a bit of agency which is separate from the state now where is the role for that? I think that's a great question I think the role for that is small gestures that have some way of we talk about trickling down trickling up to bigger change and I'll give you an example some of you I don't know if any of you follow American basketball I don't actually but there's this famous guy named LeBron James who you may have heard about he's a big star and he created a school and his school in some ways is like the cafe his school is in Akron, Ohio where he grew up poor town very underfunded public schools about $5,000 a year spending per student other places in Ohio $30,000 per year this is our system in America he goes in and he creates one school now he does a very good thing by making it a public school he works within the public school system he floods it with LeBron James money he auctions off a bunch of his sneakers so there's some sneakers on the wall on the left side of the wall when you enter but then there's the missing other sneaker those have all been auctioned to people money goes to the school and so that school is amazing right? if you're a kid there and you don't have food in your house there's a room you can go and they give you peanut butter and cans of tomatoes and bread and eggs and you can take that home because they understand that if the other things are not working around a kid you can't learn there's a room with blankets this is an elaborate version of your cafe it's not solving America's problem it's not solving Ohio's problem but it's taking one group of very at risk kids and it's actually doing everything for them there's even a civil servant from the city of Akron who sits in the school every day and parents can come in any problem they have with the city government my pension check's not coming this, that, they can go and that woman will just solve it for you so you don't have to spend five days running around the city and you can take care of your kid so they've figured that out so I went to the school and I was talking to the principal and talking to the people at the school and I said what is your theory is this just going to stay in the school and that would be great they'd help hundreds of kids in a city of hundreds of thousands of people or is there some ambition with a star this big to go beyond this school and I think that's the question of your cafe my suggestion to the school but not to be to shut down nor to that cafe hardly my question would be how can we push from the cafe to a change in how mental health is dealt with in this country for everybody how can we push from Lebron school to others and so with Lebron school the thing that I thought of with this principal is let's say he runs a school and he helps these thousand kids fantastic he's Lebron James he can get the best documentary filmmaker in the world to come in and make a movie about that school and then millions of people may watch one of the best movies of the year about that school and actually the message of the movie could be I shouldn't have had to do this it is a ridiculous country that asks a rich guy to auction their sneakers for kids to get the same education that other kids get I'm doing this but I shouldn't have to do this this is actually barbarism you have a movie about that you move people now he's started to affect the culture he's started to maybe affect voters then I don't love money in politics but let's imagine that he does this we have the system where you can give a lot of money then Lebron starts a let's imagine he starts what we call a super pack he starts raising money gives his own money and he starts funding political candidates who commit to equalizing public school funding in a way in which you could start with stopping the bleeding helping the kids in front of you 100, 200, 300 kids in front of you but you could bubble up to affecting politics for everybody improving that issue with the system shaming the underlying cause of this issue which is some people getting 5,000 some getting 30,000 and I guess all I'm arguing is that what happens in the cafe or the school need not stay there is to address that small thing and help the people in front of you that push towards larger change and there's a lot of people who do that kind of work and there's other ways to do it where it never leaves the perimeter that is a really interesting vignette about Lebron James and there is so much that goes through that and so much of what I hear coming through that is about a failed politics failed politics when it comes to race failed politics when it comes to ruin your education system a failed politics when it comes to allowing rampant inequality so it relies upon an ex basketball player to crude out much money that he then steps in right I can give you other examples from Britain or elsewhere where you come across people who are civil society actors who effectively spend a huge amount of time battling the state where it's local government or central government for permission to do XYZ or begging the state to give it a bit of time and money and it doesn't work now in Britain there is a phrase which has become really common of notice over the past few months politics is broken now you have even politicians who say politics is broken and by the way the people the politicians who say that are the ones who help break it in the first place in America I'm sure you have your own equivalent of that and yet your prescription is politics is broken but don't worry because at some point over the next few decades we'll get together and we'll fix it I'm not so sure it is fixable I'm not so sure that the system is reformable and one of the things that I'm left wondering about the argument you've made is do you want a capitalism that's less ugly, less barbaric or do you want something else that's just different I think all of the above I think you can't say politics is broken and not have faith in it getting fixed without understanding at least in the American context who did that there was a very specific project led by the business sector to discredit and maim and starve government and it started in the late 70s and it has the results to prove it we have every graph shows this relative stability and a bunch of indicators and then they all go crazy around 1979 1980 1981 so I don't actually feel that kind of existential hopeness that politics is broken we know who did it, we know how they did it we know when they did it and that makes it reversible the reality is the 1% had about 12% of the nation's income up to then and it just doubled it to me it's not worth turning this into some metaphysical crazy thing about politics is broken to me there was a very specific crime that was committed and I think justice can be done for that crime and so you had Bill Clinton, Barack Obama who were active handmaidness all of that within Reagan's framework and before that people in Britain will remember that we had a Labour government in the 70s which effectively acted as a precursor for Thatcher so it's not like this is something that's recent this is something which goes back this is a 40 year generation no it goes beyond 40 years, it goes back a long way and you talk about capitalism working in America or in Britain there was a time when capitalism worked in Britain that time was in the Hay Day of the Empire since that's gone Britain hasn't really been the same country since it's interesting, I think for us it's different it's a lot of the indicators when Haywire when you started to have this war not just on government but on the idea of government and that makes me not confident that you're going to just instantaneously make government better but I actually think this is not you know this is not miles and miles away in the sense that it was pretty easy for them to switch it this way and I don't think it's necessarily I think in a way the business world wants there to be this fatalism about politics is broken I think that's a I mean I think politics is working great for that world view I'm serious I'm not sure it's broken, I think it's working exactly the way a certain group of people wanted it to work and I think another group of people don't want it to work in a way where you can no longer work and have a decent living for most people or people don't benefit from change or people don't benefit from globalization and trade and technology I don't think it's some mysterious thing that maybe we can I really don't I mean every time Davos has these conferences the fourth industrial revolution it's so complicated what's the future of work I honestly think a lot of this is foolishness I just think right now the balance between business and every other sector of society is hugely out of whack and I think if you reined it in substantially it's not about the state doing everything it's about the state doing some of the proper things that it ought to do the basic rule setting the basic negotiation of people's conflicts the basic problems that we are too powerless to do individually I think you'd see pretty significant changes and the good thing about a democracy is we are always one election away from pretty substantial change and you know I live in the United States on something called Obamacare healthcare that's a really you could not someone like me who works independently could not buy healthcare before that that's a big change and so if you imagine more such changes I think you start to get a very different society and I'm not fatalistic about that being impossible alright let's be a bit more optimistic I'm still remaining political the world that you describe market world you call it where people come up with alibis and handouts to cover up the bad that they do that world is it now over do we now have a politics of Trump and Brexit over here where people are no longer bothering with the alibis anymore now you actually Trump gives out money to his family and to his mates in Brexit we have a kind of that talks about creating turning Britain to Singapore so the need for niceties by the right is now seems to be over and the battle lines are a lot more stark and unignorable I think a lot of what I write about in the book was business people very wealthy people actually writing a rule book that has since become the explicit rule book for Trump the brexitiers which is a rule book that basically said government is bad business people are good entrepreneurs are heroes and that the people who break things are the best at fixing people who cause problems are the best at solving the arsonists are the best firefighters and that language particularly for Trump created the playbook where he as you say now does it explicitly without any of the niceties I used to manufacture stuff in Mexico and China so I know how we can bring jobs back from Mexico and China I worked the system with donating to politicians so only I can fix it and so on and so forth but he didn't invent that language that language has been laid as this kind of philanthrocapitalist fantasy and my hope is that Donald Trump people with his level of IQ often have unintended consequences that exceed their intended consequences and my hope is that he's actually doing some work of discrediting this ideology this 40 year reign of this particular notion in American public life that he'll bring down more than just himself when he leaves I think it was Christopher Hitchens who said that the best argument for getting rid of royal family was Prince Charles and it's that kind of argument you're making I wonder if we could have a look at any of the questions that have come in and while I'm going to sift through those I want to ask you a last question from me what do you see in today's politics that makes you hopeful what I see and you have to tell me how much this is happening here because of Brexit what I see happening because of Trump is a bunch of people who particularly young people who would have been or were on autopilot realizing that they have to take the wheel I think these are people who would have gone to Silicon Valley and made apps or would have gone to these banks or would have started a restaurant or would have just done jobs and who realized that they had neglected the farm of democracy they had kind of treated democracy like a supermarket where you pop in when you need something and it's not that it's a farm and no one had been tending the farm and you got a weed as a president and so what I see is a lot of people running for office getting involved just knowing the names of legislators and bill numbers and people are now obsessive really there's a civic revival we had more women more people of color running for office in the 2018 elections in the US than ever and a bunch of them won and a bunch of those women did not win but their daughters all saw them run and will run one day themselves maybe there is a a to me a revival of the idea of public power that is refreshing and what I really hope is that we don't just go from Trump to some other president or you all don't go from Brexit to you know the hangover but that there's actually a larger transition of this age we're talking about from what I call the age of capital to the age of reform where the in a way the center of gravity of the society changes where the most exciting work to do is public work where the most interesting project of the society or the shared projects NASA just announced that rich people can now pay money to go to space 50 years ago in America it was like space is this thing we do together and now it's a form of tourism the government's ship is a form of tourism for rich people I think there's a way in which that is coming back and I see young people actually more interested in the public than the private I don't know if that's forever but it seems to be a glimmer of hope right now remember that even while America was sending people to the moon Gil Scott Heron was saying where's Whitey? Whitey's on the moon that's why no problems here have been sorted out listen the bad news about these questions is that they're very good and so I'm not going to read all of them out to you but I'm certainly going to give these a fair shout first one from Pete Burden what do you do if you suddenly found yourself with a billion dollars? great question I don't know people ask me that all the time I don't know I still don't know I need a good answer to that one look I think I would do what I tell philanthropists to do which is to give back in ways that don't shore up a bad system but help break it down and I really do believe we should be in a world in which people don't have the opportunity they do now to make and keep as much money but what the question presumes is something like the world we're in now where that for now people do have that money and they can buy a boat or they can give back or they can do whatever else and I think there are ways to give back that would tend towards system change and there are ways to give back that would defer or stave off system change one example actually going back to that LeBron thing we have this very unequal public school funding in America it is a manifest cruelty I don't know if there's any other rich country that even does it this way funding education by local property taxes it's actually insane and there are people trying to fight that that's the only fight you'd have to win a supreme court case so we're talking 20-30 years of battles in the courts waiting for the supreme court to change which it will at some point farming cases so that you get this case, you get that case you get conflicting cases that co-op so they have to take it's a whole thing same thing they did with the gay marriage cases takes years those lawyers get no philanthropic funding in general you give those lawyers a billion dollars in terms of philanthropy is nothing you give away America's philanthropy is $410 billion a year you give those guys $1 billion I feel they would like yeah I can get you the supreme court case that's a lot of money for the work they do you're talking about 10-15 lawyers they could do a lot with that maybe get some more lawyers farm some more cases change how people think about this issue no one funds them, isn't that interesting why? because if they succeed what's going to happen every rich person in America their home is going to lose 20% of its value because 20% of that value is because of how good the public school is next to them so that's the kind of issue that is a really important issue where you donating to that as a rich person are not doing that to shore up your privilege you are actually putting your own privilege your own class at risk by doing that and I actually think there's many causes like that you know I think if you are a person who wants to help empower women and you sort of donate to some kind of like lean in circle you are actually advancing a kind of corporate feminism that is in many ways not about empowering women at all but about trying to convince women that patriarchy is a posture problem that if they lean at a different level of recline patriarchy would just melt away but I think on the other hand if you spent a billion dollars advocating for in the United States family leave policies, maternity leave policies better harassment laws etc you would actually be empowering women and you would be doing a way that comes with the expense of rich people because those things cost money to enforce they require higher taxes you wouldn't be doing yourself a favor necessarily by funding that cause but you would be doing the right thing I think one way to answer that question with any act of giving to ask yourself by doing this if I were to succeed wildly would I be shoring up my position or threatening it and I think the latter is actually more philanthropic okay so you go to Aspen and you make a speech that slags off everyone at Aspen you become a billionaire and you try and put billionaires out of business you're forever trying to soar off the branch of the tree that you're sitting on next question from Jonah Johnson do you worry that your critique of philanthropy will be commodified by those very philanthropists for their own benefit I mean I think about whether you know there's a tendency in that world to try to take unsafe ideas and make them safer and I you know I try to resist that all the time and people even just when I have dialogues of people like that okay this is great but let's just talk about let's not talk about all the things critiques let's just talk about the three solutions let's start there I'm not going to start there I'm going to start with the critique it's very important and sometimes hard to remain intellectually honest in the face of people who want to turn this into okay well let's just what can we do Monday morning say no no no you have to start with a place of understanding what this is so I do worry about that I try to not participate in that but I have to say having been very tough on these people I have found that to my surprise a lot of people in the world whether it's the plutocratic world the kind of philanthropist world impact investors whatever have actually allowed themselves to be challenged by this book doesn't mean they agree with all of it some do many don't but I have seen more engagement and willingness to go there than I expected and I don't know what that's going to lead to here's a question which goes back to I think your previous book actually I find it particularly interesting from someone on Twitter called doomkit what do we do with the emergent cast of uneconomic unvalued working class people I think fight for I think the word cast is very important there to be honest because it is becoming hereditary in the way that cast implies and I think we don't I'll just speak for the United States American self-image is of being the opposite of a cast society the American self-image is we are the society most where your position is determined most by effort and actually among the rich countries we are the country where that is least true we're actually at the bottom of that OECD ranking in America your position is most inherited from your parents among the rich countries in Scandinavia predictably it's the least and so America is one of the points I've been making for years is you know India when I was a reporter in India India was becoming a little bit less of a cast society and America was in that time becoming more of one and that's a very that's the wrong way to go and I think the answer to it is supporting again I actually don't think the answer is super mysterious you know the answer is supporting the kinds of common institutions and laws that would arrest that the reality is if you just look among the countries of Europe and the United States there's a tremendous amount of variation and we don't have to be fatalistic about that in some countries among these rich countries if you work 30 hours a week at a retailer and get a bad flu you die and in other countries you don't that's not crazy metaphysics that they're just pretty straightforward laws you could write that don't let companies deny you healthcare just because you work 30 hours right and I can tell you the moment when there was a proposal for that to be 40 to be 20 and they got 30 I mean these are very contingent things and if you make those things different you get different outcomes I'm not saying they're not difficult fights but they're also not you know 100 year fights there are things that if you got the right excitement half of people don't vote in America if you got 10% of those people don't vote to vote the kind of things you could do would be extraordinary but you got to figure out how to do that you have to excite people enough to make people invest it in the idea that that this stuff matters and so I think the biggest thing that will prevent that caste based system are a set of rules around work and around taxation that are designed to make most people benefit from the future and not allow the future to be captured again and again and again America's got an election next year Britain could well have two elections by the time you have yours although we've not planned for any I think that's healthier and on the democratic side it seems pretty much half the party is running to be the candidate right? which of the people that you see standing and you've just done a tremendous profile of Bernie Sanders for Time Magazine which of the people that you see in the race comes closest taken on the agenda that you see America needs to follow I think Sanders and Warren Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders yes both senators she from Massachusetts, he from Vermont good friends actually of each other not of me if you read my Bernie Sanders profile you will understand I tried to be his friend but he did not try to be mine both of them I think for a long time it's not just in this campaign have a very clear record of being power busters what they're trying to do is actually rearrange power in American life if they were to succeed and be able to get what they want done power would be different I think you you add up she wants to tax the wealth of 75,000 not the income of the wealth which is a pretty taboo thing in America of 75,000 of the richest families to fund universal college for everybody to wipe out everybody's student debt pretty much and to fund universal childcare those are the kinds of things by the way going back to your previous thing we treat this all as a mystery if you had universal childcare in college and you wiped out everybody's debt that's a pretty different society already at least in the United States we don't need to treat this as like politics is broke people's lives would be very very different and her economists say you just tax 75,000 people and you tax them at a level their wealth at a level where they'd still have more wealth every year just a little less than they would otherwise have had so I think Sanders and Warren are very clear on being the power buster side I think there's some other people like Cory Booker who are Joe Biden who are really friendly to corporations have always been friendly to corporations and you can expect that that's sort of where they're going to be and then there's some other people often in some ways newer faces who just don't have a record that we know Pete Buttigieg and others who we have some suspicions about but who frankly have gestured a little bit this way and a little bit that way and we don't know yet and I think my guess is they don't know yet they don't know deciding where to land on these things and the one thing I will say I mean it's kind of laughable it's a clown car of people coming out of the car and running for president, 25 people or whatever it is in one party but not that you don't know anything about that either although you've got the cocaine elimination game going on which is a fun game but I actually think this is going to be a great primary I think this is a primary of ideas actually because it's hard to think about a contest that actually has it all this is the full spectrum of the modern left from an actual left in Bernie Sanders a capitalist left reformist left Elizabeth Warren all the way to people who would probably end up being like Facebook executives if they weren't we know about that in this country right oh gosh Mr Clegg and I think this is going to be great I think what we are already talking about we're going to talk about more we're going to talk about class, capitalism, race we're talking about gender we're talking about whether backgrubs when backgrubs become too rubby you know I described the contest between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden and Joe Biden as a contest between tactile versus sterile too much rubbing versus rubbing people the wrong way and so this is going to be a contest about everything Seinfeld was a show about nothing the 2020 Democratic primary is a show about everything and I actually think it's good I think people are going to really be able to choose in a way that a lot of things have been off the table we've massaged off stage before I think this is going to be a real smorgasbord of options and if you had to put 100 tax deductible dollars on one of those candidates to go against Trump who do you think is going to be the one on the ticket who do you think it will be don't say Joe Biden I mean I don't know I honestly I've never felt less sure I mean at this stage in the process those times there's a pretty decent answer I don't know I mean the math would suggest Biden Biden's really in a very commanding position right now but he's also the one everybody knows because he was vice president for eight years and I don't know I really don't know I actually think a lot of people are basing their pitch on well I'm the one who can be Trump because of XYZ because I'm from this state because I'm white because I'm a man anybody is telling you they have the formula for beating Trump where were you three years ago so I think we have to just actually have a contest and we can't do game theory in the contest where we say I really like you and you're definitely the best candidate but that person can be Trump they're the worst candidate but they can definitely be Trump I think it's a very strange game to play I think you just pick the best I don't know maybe I'm old fashioned it moves ahead I think you just actually pick the best person that's my theory okay but there is a tax deduction that's up for grabs here if you had to bet where would you bet go who it would be probably Biden just because momentum oh dear okay look last question and this comes from a name I recognise Ian Chambers who is one of the people at the Beffey which is a community owned pub on a housing estate near here a pub which was actually set up and run in the face of significant state action you'll be pleased to know done entirely by the civil society his question is a good one to end with do you see any revolutions on the horizon I mean I see first of all I would argue that we may be living through some that we don't quite like you know I would argue cutting Britain off from the extraordinary achievement the extraordinary and yes admittedly totally dull achievement of the European Union is a revolution maybe a wrong way revolution but it's revolutionary in the amount that it uproots in the kind of leap of faith that it requires Donald Trump was a revolution these are both counter revolutions right but they're in terms of the break with the past they're counter revolutions for me but for the people who are prosecuting them they feel like revolutions this is the problem they felt in America that they were bringing in someone is finally telling the truth and finally saying the unspeakable and all of this and they had that feeling what I hope is that actually different revolutions available to us that are not about someone like Donald Trump who's a billionaire who's not even a billionaire pretending to be a savior of people he hates but actually a kind of taking back of power and efforts to redistribute power that are maybe originating in that cafe but bubbling up maybe originating in Lebron's school but bubbling up but bubbling up leading to in my country getting money out of politics getting lobbying shut down effectively getting to a situation where things that 51 or 60 or 70% of people want more routinely get done when did that stop happening getting to a place where when the future reigns on our societies most people feel some water these feel like elusive things right now and maybe they're revolutionary things they're also things we know how to do and I think these are in that sense achievable revolutions I think that's why all those women ran for office in 2018 not because they thought this was something that was going to happen 300 years from now because I think they thought that this is something that can happen now or the next year or the next year and I'm with them and I hope we make some of these things happen very good we're going to leave it there Anand will be in the bar signing copies of his book and I dare say fielding any more questions you want to put to him but from me and on behalf of Louise and the meaning conference team thank you for joining us meaning will be having its full conference in November and I think details will be handed out around the venue and are up on their website now but for now thank you Anand thank you so much